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One summer’s night in 2001, Danny Dyer was on stage at the Lincoln Center in New York, in Harold Pinter’s Celebration, and his mind emptied out. He was 24 years old and had stayed up all of the night before smoking crack so when he went on stage, he was sleep-deprived and wired.

“I was abusing myself so much, my brain wasn’t ready and I didn’t have a clue what to say. The blood rushed from my feet to my head and I was petrified. I felt so vulnerable”, he says. “Never really been the same since. It’s like a boxer who wins 27 fights and no-one gets near him and then they get knocked out and they’re never the same again.”

‘I think about 10 years ago, I was a bit of a laughing stock, and I created a lot of that myself. I became a parody of myself’

Pinter, a famously no-nonsense man, “bollocked” him after the show. “He was disappointed in me. He didn’t like the company I was keeping and he told me that.”

A valuable lesson learned, then. “No. I said, ‘fuck off ‘arold you’re not telling me who I can hang out with, you know what I mean?’”

Martin Freeman and Danny Dyer in The Dumb Waiter. Photo: Marc Brenner

Eighteen years on, Dyer is, if not an entirely changed man, then at least a man who is doing a good impression of one. He strides in brandishing a potato salad in one hand and a green juice in the other, arms flung wide for a hug. He calls me “baby” and he looks like what he is – a boy done good – expensive winter coat, petrol blue turtleneck, ghost of a tan.

He is polite, thoughtful and creatively sweary, though there is none of the cockney slang that pours out of him like poetry when he’s in front of a camera. “I think about 10 years ago, I was a bit of a laughing stock, and I created a lot of that myself,” he says, rubbing his stubble. “I became a parody of myself. Whatever that means.”

The night before we meet, he wins the award for Best Serial Drama Performance at the National Television Awards, for his role as Mick in Eastenders. He dedicated his choked acceptance speech to Pinter and to children living in poverty: “Do not let where you’ve come from define where you’re going in life. You can be whoever you want to be.” He finished with a flourish: “I live by two rules: curb your ego, nourish your soul.”

How does he do that? “Well,” he says, stabbing a potato with a fork. “I’ve become quite spiritual. I believe there’s a higher power looking after me. Maybe there’s something that has been dragging me through life. I’ve had a mad couple of years, a lot of soul-searching. Pre that, I was a bit of a lunatic. Self-sabotage, all that.”

That self-sabotage included bingeing on drink and drugs, “everything really. I had no one to stop me.

“I was in such a dark place, I was slowly committing suicide. I had no hope, I hated myself, couldn’t look in the mirror for more than five seconds. It just repulsed me, what was looking back. I was just pressing the fuck-it button all the time. It got to a point where I thought I was going to die – I don’t think I’m going to wake up.”

A couple of years ago, he went to rehab. “That’s what I needed – and it worked.” Now 41, he meditates daily. “Just for 10 minutes, to turn the noises down in my head. I think that should be compulsory in schools BY THE WAY,” he says, sounding suddenly furious, which happens when he is being emphatic (see: every television voiceover he has ever done).

Sometimes he wonders if that higher power, looking on and getting him to this point, might be Harold Pinter. The playwright, who died in 2008, gave him his first stage role – in Celebration – after seeing him in the film Human Traffic. Roles in No Man’s Land at the National Theatre, and The Homecoming at the Almeida followed. Tonight, Dyer opens in the West End in The Dumb Waiter, in the culmination of Pinter at the Pinter, a season of plays marking a decade since the playwright’s death.

“Harold was a very important part of my life. Not just because of what he brought me, credibility-wise, but he was the first man, really – and this is no disrespect to me dad – who put his arm round me and spoke to me in a way I’d never been spoken to before… He would shout at me in this voice, which would make me go, ‘Oh, I like that. I’ve never had that. I want that again.’”

Danny Dyer in Human Traffic in 1999. Photo: Rex

He dedicated his alternative Christmas message on Channel 4 to the playwright and is now shooting a documentary about his work for Sky Arts. Back in 2000, though, he had no idea who Pinter was. He read the script, and liked it straight away – “I thought, ‘oh, this really does roll off the tongue, actually’”. He was also hungry for work and had a baby daughter to feed. “I shook Harold’s hand, said ‘how ya doin’, son?’ And that was the start of our relationship.”

As the waiter in Celebration, he had three speeches in which he had to list all the illustrious people his grandfather had, apparently, once known: “Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, George Barker, Dylan Thomas…”

Pinter invited him to his house to explain to Dyer who they all were. “He’d have a bottle of wine and he’d buy me a little six-pack of lager. We’d just sit and talk shit and have a laugh as well. He’d set up a little camp bed for me but I never stayed. I could say the names with conviction, but he said, ‘no, listen, let’s try and educate you’.”

It didn’t always work. He did No Man’s Land a year later: “And I didn’t have a fucking clue what it was going on about. Did it for six months and I never understood.”

‘Harold would have a bottle of wine and he’d buy me a little six-pack of lager. We’d just sit and talk shit and have a laugh as well. He’d set up a little camp bed for me but I never stayed’

In The Dumb Waiter he and Martin Freeman play two hit men, waiting in an increasingly surreal basement set-up for the details of their next job. It is glorious – funny, menacing and with some of Pinter’s finest rat-a-tat dialogue. “Danny has an inherent understanding of Pinter’s language – the working-class banter and the music hall rhythms,” says Jamie Lloyd, who directs. “He is effortlessly funny and yet can access the hidden depths beneath the comedy – the sinister threat and the insecurities behind the hard man exterior. He’s the real deal.”

“He liked the idea of a conversation being a war between two people,” says Dyer. “A friendly war, but a war.”

Danny Dyer as hitman Ben in The Dumb Waiter. Photo: Marc Brenner

Danny Dyer was born in Canning Town, east London. The idea that he would become an actor was ridiculous – “You’ll become a criminal or if you’re lucky, a boxer, or you’ll follow in your dad’s footsteps, become a painter and decorator” – but drama was the only lesson he enjoyed at school so when a teacher told him about a weekend class in Kentish Town that was free for single-parent families, he went. “I never had the fare, so I bunked the train. I just wanted to get there.”

He got his first part, aged 16 in Prime Suspect 3 but it was his turn as the drug-addled Moff in Human Traffic that got him noticed. So began a decade of playing geezers, wide boys, vigilantes and hard nuts in over 30 British gangster films, football hooligan dramas, horrors and noirs.

‘Acting is not about doing a thousand accents. If it was, Alistair McGowan the impressionist would be the best actor on the planet, wouldn’t he?’

“What people attack me for is that I play the same role. But every actor does the same thing every time, really, they just change their accent. Look at Benedict [Cumberbatch] – brilliant, but does the same thing. Tom Hardy – no matter what accent, still does EXACTLY the same thing. He does the same thing in Peaky Blinders as he does as Bane [in The Dark Knight Rises] – he just hasn’t got the thing over his mouth. But they don’t give anything away so therefore they’re these ‘brilliant chameleons’.

“Acting is not about doing a thousand accents. If it was, Alistair McGowan the impressionist would be the best actor on the planet, wouldn’t he?”

Danny Dyer as Mick Carter in Eastenders – the role that saved his career. Photo: BBC/ Jack Barnes

For a time, Dyer greenlit every script that came through his door, but he rarely bothered to read them first, so he ended up in dud after dud culminating in 2013’s Run For Your Wife, a Ray Cooney farce, which The Independent mooted as “the biggest turkey ever filmed”; it took £747 in its opening weekend. “Maybe it didn’t work”, says Dyer. “But they assassinated it.”

‘It chips away at ya – going to some club in Kidderminster, hopefully there’s enough people in there, and they give you an envelope at the end. I had to pay bills’

After that, he says, people didn’t want to work with him. He started doing personal appearances at nightclubs, waving and posing for selfies. “It chips away at ya – going to some club in Kidderminster and they give you an envelope at the end. I had to pay bills and I’ve got children. I was on my arse. I couldn’t catch a cold.”

So when Eastenders came knocking in 2013 – despite previously saying he’d have to be “fat, bald and 50” before he took a part on Albert Square – he grabbed it with both hands. Playing Mick – the alpha male landlord of the Queen Vic who wears a pink dressing gown – has been transformative. “It saved my career,” he says, simply.

Indeed, the past five years have seen something of a Dyer renaissance. The professional geezer with a wild Twitter account has morphed into TV historian, celebrity father, common-sense political pundit, among other things. Last year, he presented Have I Got News For You for the first time. “I did feel, can I do this? Am I just being the token cockney? I was allowed four ‘fucks’, I got them out the way early doors.

“I thought, no, actually, I’m quite intelligent. People think I’m thick as shit and I’m not. I don’t know that much about politics but then I don’t think any politician knows that much about politics, either.”

‘You’ve got Theresa May and all these people running around, attacking each other. It’s embarrassing. It’s like Spitting Image has come back again’

Last year, a clip of him on Good Evening Britain went viral when he distilled a nation’s rage at David Cameron and the Brexit chaos he unleashed with one perfect word (“Twat”). He’s still fuming now. “It’s incredible that this man is now swanning around doing after-dinner speeches, earning his money on the back of being our leader for however many years it was. The whole country is a complete mess because he called this thing on. And because it didn’t go his way, the next day he’s gone? Where is he?”

He voted Leave – “and then I realised it was a massive mistake, because I was lied to. It can’t be done, this thing that you’ve put to us. And you’ve got Theresa May and all these people running around, attacking each other. It’s embarrassing. It’s like Spitting Image has come back again.”

His family – historic and living – have played their part in the Dyer resurgence, too. He has been with his wife Joanne Mas since they were 14 years old – on and off – and they have three children. Their oldest, Dani, who is 22, won Love Island in 2018, with pen salesman Jack Fincham, much to the heart-bursting pride of her father, who watched the show most nights, “sobbing [his] heart out”.

“We thought, ‘we ain’t done a bad job here.’ Dani can be a bit trappy,” he mimes a blabbing mouth. “She’s quite strong minded and a bit of a stress-head. But the vulnerability that she showed, people loved.”

‘Dani became more famous than me, in a sense. I feared for her. It’s my first born child’

Today, Dani has 3.5 million followers on Instagram, her own television show, fashion range, autobiography and all the other trappings of instant fame. “She became more famous than me, in a sense,” says Dyer. “I feared for her. It’s my first born child.”

He says Jack is a “nice kid” but he never sees him as they moved out straight away. “As long as he looks after my daughter I’ll be his best friend in the fucking world, just don’t let me down, do you know what I mean?” Good luck, Jack.

In 2016, he appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? and discovered he was directly descended from Edward III, William the Conqueror and Thomas Cromwell. His family tree now hangs on the wall of his house, in Debden, Essex – “Of course it does!” – and he has just fronted a series about his “nutty” regal roots.

It saw him, among other things, try on armour (“It’s like wearing another man”), joust with a watermelon (“‘Ave some of that!”), slurp whey (“Tastes like Philadelphia”) and visit numerous castles and chapels (“If God was going to have some windows, they’d be his windows”).

He thinks his favourite discovery was King Edward II, a medieval king who was caught with his gay lover. This is how he tells me the story. “So his wife, whatever her name was, cut his boyfriend’s, let’s say dinkle, off, and threw it on a fire. Then they put him in this cell and they ran in with a hot poker and put it up his arse.” It’s history, but not as we know it. “I think you learn with me, that’s the key,” he says, thoughtfully.

Does he feel different, walking through the world now? “I’ve got their blood, haven’t I? Their genes. It’s a good way of me sticking my fingers up at the establishment,” he spreads his arms wide, grins like the Cheshire Cat. “They’re my ancestors. It did fill a bit of a void.”

As rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine faces life for murder - here's his plea deal

Michael Jackson: What happened to Jordan Chandler and Gavin Arvizo?

The Bay: where is the ITV drama filmed and why?

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